"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Fun Times at the 2012 Republican National Convention

For a hot second last weekend it seemed like an entertaining possibility to liveblog or drinkblog the inevitable nonsense of the Goopers' drunken Tampa trawl this week. But then I remembered, just in the nick of time, that I prefer to enjoy myself when I drink.

And sorry, there's just nothing enjoyable about this shitstorm of toxic buffoonery anymore, even by its inept, cringeworthy execution. Utter stupidity is only amusing when it has no real chance of succeeding, and while the smart money's still on Barry O, there are sadly enough dipshits in our fair land to make it close enough to wonder. It is only small, brief consolation that this weeklong sideshow was apparently eclipsed by the ongoing antics of some inbred fatbodies speaking some unknown patois in between what must be intravenous infusions of deep-fried Twinkies.

Even viewed through the kaleidoscope of Daily Show absurdity, these people make me sick to my stomach. Buncha pasty, doughy (and overwhelmingly white and old) middle-management assholes and exurban hausfraus who look like they'd be hard-pressed to fix anything, much less build it. Seriously, most of these people look like they'd fuck up a shit sandwich. But they're gonna fix our broke-dick gubmint that that Obammy wrecked all by hisself, with pure moxie and/or gumption. Riiiight.

So. The brilliant master plan here is to balance the budget on the backs of those least able to bear it, since ten full years of job-creating tax cuts have somehow failed to, um, create jobs. More of that, please, because it's worked spectacularly. Let's make sure that the "hard truths" that future Secretary of Cake Bobby BacalaChris Christie spoke of only apply to the peons, and not to the mighty engines of accumulation and pelf. Eventually 99% of Americans won't have a pot to piss in, or a window to through it out of, and these assholes can just sell shit to each other. It's the way John Galt would have wanted it.

As for golden boy Paul Ryan, they can fact-check his happy horseshit from now until November, and it won't matter. The tragic beauty of the current model of Gooper is that they are unconstrained, unimpressed by mere facts, or the refutation of false-fact agitprop. Just as the advent of Sarah Palin and her tribe of bumptious snowbillies made us damn near miss the subtle wit and vigor of George W. Bush, so does the trajectory of the party and its box of mismatched wingnuts promise to make us miss La Palin's Dorothy Parker-isms by, oh, 2014.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of their tedious jabber is this weird fixation -- this throbbing, constant, fucking obsession -- over abortion, and specifically over forcing rape victims to carry to term and bear the by-product of a horrific, life-altering crime. This is the sort of shit one has come to expect of, say, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, countries that, like these homegrown monsters, also obsess just a little too much over Teh Ghey.

The most vile and unacceptable thing about all these platform planks these chumps profess to believe in, as a matter of intellectual probity, no less, is that everyone -- including them -- knows the built-in hypocrisy to their deeply held prinicples. The teabaggers showed their true stripes long ago -- they believe plenty in gubmint money and interference, just so long as it benefits them. The minute someone else catches a break from it, it's the advent of Castro-style communism.

Ditto all the other issues -- everyone else must bootstrap whilst they cash their farm-subsidy checks and get SBA loans (and in Ryan's case, collect Social Security death benefits); everyone else must pay normal payroll tax rates so that Mittford and friends can get their capital gains rates lowered to 1%, to sock ever more money away in the Caymans and Switzerland; and you know there's no goddamned way that if any of their daughters/sisters/wives were raped and impregnated (despite Surgeon General OB/GYN Akin's imprecations to the contrary), that they would force them to carry and bear it. They're a bunch of goddamned liars and hypocrites, daring you to call them on it, and again, it's no longer funny, it's truly nauseating.

And hey, speaking of nauseating, didja check fambly-valyews poster boy and doddering jackass Clint Eastwood's attempt to mock-interview an empty chair? [Note to Clint: it was Dick Cheney who told Pat Leahy to "go fuck himself" on the floor of the US Senate. It's true! Ask your greatgranddaughter how Teh Google works sometime, when she's done changing your diapers.] Gawd, what a half-assed effort at whatever it was -- comedy, commentary, making a coherent logical case for one candidate over the other. Whatever the fuck that mess was supposed to be, it failed so badly, you couldn't really even get all that angry at it, just feel sad that an authentic American film icon, rather than pulling off a Reagan or a Schwarzenegger, was revealed as a rambling, shambling husk of what they thought he was.

Sure, the peanut-chucking boozehounds in the crowd drank it up, it's a pep rally. But the rest of the nation saw Grampa getting shithoused at Thanksgiving, rising to his feet in surly glory to lecture a hapless child, only to have his pants fall around his ankles, revealing only chicken legs and leaky Depends. Nice surprise guest, gang. Maybe you can pull in Jon Voight next time, if you try real hard. Pretty please.

Look, no one has any illusions about the feckless Dummycrats, people whose sole defining characteristic is consistently taking a knife (or a feather) to a gunfight. Even if he manages to win, Obama has to up his game if he is to get anything accomplished; these assholes have made it abundantly clear that they are more than happy to lawn-dart the country further just to improve their chances in the next election.

But at least the Democrats seem to feel at least a little guilty about fucking over the middle class. If this week of Two Minutes of Hate segments gives any indication, the Republicans take a weird sort of glee in it, the gleam an evil, shitty kid gets in his eye as he shoves an M80 in the rectum of a hapless bullfrog, and prepares to light the fuse. They get off on this shit.

If there were a way for every GOP supporter to bear the full brunt of every policy they're endorsing, without the rest of us having to, I'd be all for it. In fact, it'd be their karma. Unfortunately, in this case, the devil we know, the devil we currently have, is much more preferable than Vulture and Voucher and their weird hordes, not a single conscience in the entire lot of them.